>>1139242I'm not going to go all SI-autist on you but goddamn can you please not mix square feet with watts when talking about solar power, it hurts my head. Insolation at the earth's surface is coincidentally close to 1000W/sqm, so it's super easy to convert from collector area and efficiency to get power output.
>>1139254Yo, solar car bro here. I have actually sat in and driven the car pictured in your post. Ditto for Stella (your last link). I've raced three solar cars all over the world, two of which I helped build with my own two hands. And I have attended at least one solar car competition every year for over a decade.
Solar cars are a super neat engineering challenge, but it's a 100% impractical concept for an ordinary passenger car. Given how passenger cars are shaped, your average 4-door sedan has far LESS area for solar cells than the little single-seat racecars I built. And they consume orders of magnitude more energy. There's simply no way to build a modern, 4-door, crash-tested, low-NVH, consumer passenger vehicle that generates even a single percent of the energy it consumes via onboard solar cells.
>so what? It's after all 30km for free
Nope, costs money. Ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The solar array adds weight to your car (the cells themselves, extra wiring, extra power electronics, durable glass covering the cells on what would otherwise be lightweight sheetmetal, etc), and likely adds aerodynamic drag - both of which result in requiring extra energy to move around as a result! Spoiler: You are about 500% better off, dollar for dollar, spending the money to put a solar array on the roof of your house.
>>1139259Yeah, and that 6sqm SunPower array is $10k in solar cells alone. Would probably add $30k to the cost of the car when you include all the wiring, control electronics, cover glass, etc.
